Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion explores the origin and evolution of the political ideology that has kept women away from centers of political power – from the birth of democracy in ancient Athens to the modern era. In this period of 2500 years, two parallel tracks advanced: while male authority tried to construct an ideology that justified women’s incompatibility with the political organization of the state, women attempted to resist their exclusion and thwart arguments about their inferiority.
Although the issue of women’s status has been studied in detail in specific eras, this interdisciplinary collection extends the boundaries of the discussion. Drawing on a wide range of literary and historical sources, including Herodotus’ Histories, Plato’s Laws, María de San José’s Oaxaca Manuscript, and the work of Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Boykin Chesnut, and Virginia Woolf, the chapters here reveal the various manifestations of the female-inferiority construct. Such an extensive overview of this historical trajectory promotes a deeper understanding of its causes, permutations, and persistence.
Women may have made great gains toward political power, but they continue to encounter invisible barriers, raised by traditional stereotypes, that block their path to success. Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion aims to make these barriers visible, raising awareness about the longevity and tenacity of arguments, the roots of which reach classical antiquity.
Author(s): Tatiana Tsakiropoulou-Summers, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou
Series: Routledge Companions
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 334
City: London
Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion- Front Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
List of illustrations
Figures
Table
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: the ideological construct of the ‘inferior female’
Continuities and breaks
The clash between democracy and patriarchy
Beyond the dismantling of democracy
Shift in scholarly focus
Goals and objectives
Methodological considerations and overview of essays
References
PART I:
Greek and Roman antiquity
Chapter 1: Solon’s legislation and women’s incompatibility with
state ideology
Introduction
Dowry and marriage
Female nature and character
Funeral laws and mourning practices
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 2: Making men and making women: ‘male superiority’
in archaic Athens
Archaic Athenian cemeteries: “a parade ground of masculinity”
Masculinity in action: athletics, pederasty, and the symposium
Herms, tyrannicides, and changing Athenian masculinity
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Powerful women and gender ideology in Herodotus’ Histories
The rhetoric of female inferiority
The constraints of nomos and gender performance
Gender fluidity: the case of Artemisia
Tomyris
Pheretime
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Women in Thucydides: absence and inferiority
Omission and relegation
Passivity and detriment: marginalized aristocratic wives
Women in war: murder, walls, and stasis
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 5: Autochthonous landscape and female exclusion in the
Athenian democracy
Athenian autochthony and motherhood
Athenian autochthony and fatherhood
Women in the public sphere: politics and military
Notes
References
Chapter 6: The politics of female madness in Greek tragedy
Introduction
Defining female madness
The case of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 7: Mechanisms of exclusion: women between ritual
and emotion
Vengeful maidens
Aeschylus’ suppliant maidens: when women create problems to men
Euripides’ suppliant mothers: when women are ignored by men
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 8: Dangerous bodies: Plato’s Laws and the ideology of
female inferiority in fourth-century Athens
Women as political actors in the Laws and The Republic
Movable wombs, inferior souls, and the dangers of female nature
Conclusion: female nature and its implications for political participation in the Laws
Notes
References
Chapter 9: Politics of the deformed: women, slaves, and democracy
in Aristotle
Women as deformed men
Natural slaves as deformed Greeks
Ethical deficiencies of the deformed: akrasia and akolasia
The state: a composite of mind and body
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 10: Women in associations in classical and Hellenistic Athens
Introduction
The evidence
Explaining the evidence
Explaining inclusion
Democracy and exclusion
Exclusion and ideology
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 11: Female reticence in republican Rome: agency and the
performance of exclusion
Resisting the Lex Oppia
Challenging the Triumvirs’ authority
Taking initiative in the early Republic
Voice or the ‘art of resistance’
The damnatio memoriae of women’s voice
Female agency
The performance of gender exclusion
Notes
References
PART II:
Renaissance through modernity
Chapter 12: Gendering civic humanism: political subjecthood and male hegemony in Renaissance Italy
Introduction: revisiting civic humanism
Spatial conceptualizations of sociability and political virtue
Inherited liberty and natural subjection
Reason and eloquence as sites of exclusion
Learning for men, learning for women
Conclusion: ruptures, continuities, and antinomies
Notes
References
Chapter 13: The materiality of female agency: Madre María de San José’s writings in seventeenth-century New Spain
The socio-cultural context of the Vida
Rhetorical stratagems of the weak and the strong
Manuscript materiality and female agency
Notes
References
Chapter 14: Woman reclaimed: subverting feminine exclusion in the
works of María de Zayas in seventeenth-century Spain
Introduction
Short stories: Desengaños Amorosos
Gender transgressions in Novelas Amorosas y Ejemplares
Notes
References
Chapter 15: Women and French democracy, 1789–1804: between the
guillotine and the Civil Code limitations
French women’s political activism
From engaging in the Revolution to the limitations of the Napoleonic Code
Conclusion: no ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ for women
Notes
References
Chapter 16: Mary Chesnut’s Civil War: female exclusion and race
in the American South
Gender limitations
Dividing women along race lines
The effect of the Civil War
Notes
References
Chapter 17: A “Society of Outsiders”: Virginia Woolf’s feminist agenda in
A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas
Heading toward women’s suffrage
A Room of One’s Own
Three Guineas
Notes
References
Chapter 18: Gender equality law in Greece and the European Union:
the trajectory from exclusion to inclusion
Introduction
The institutionalization of gender equality in Greece
The EU legal framework on gender equality as an expedient of change
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 19: Gender, citizenship, and political inclusion/exclusion in the European Union: an intersectional approach
Introduction
Intersectionality
European policies on gender, discrimination, migration, and asylum
Gender equality policies of the EC/EU
Intersecting policies: equality and anti-discrimination
Intersecting policies: asylum, migration, and discrimination
Contemporary discourses on gender, ethnicity/race, and citizenship
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
